12x Cheaper MailChimp Alternative for Email Marketing

MailChimp and MailChimp Alternative

When we started updating our blog on a regular basis, we felt there is a need to send email updates to our email subscribers on a regular basis to keep the visitors returning to our website. MailChimp was the most heard software, but we also came across a list of MailChimp Alternative. Initially, we started to send updates with Google Feedburner Email Subscriber Update feature, which is, of course, free but came with many restrictions. Understanding the need of proper email list management software and to send updates along with some useful tips to our subscribers, we started looking out for proper software. As I was looking for email marketing tool, several tools such as MailChimp and MailChimp Alternative; which include- SendinBlue, EasySendy Drip, MailerLite, AWeber, CampaignMonitor, iContact, Constant Contact, and Campayn; were found.

I did a detailed analysis of each which led me to discover some cool in-built features coupled with promising price models. These tools seemed like the solution we were looking for, and we decided to try many of these at our end.

MailVhimp – A Complete Email Marketing Solution for Newbie

Having realized the need of our own email marketing solution, the first try was obvioulsy the most simple tool known to us for ages- MailChimp. Any Start-up discussion on email marketing never ended without the mention of MailChimp marketing tool. Extremely user friendly and easy to access, Mailchimp is loved by its users for the hassle free experience in handling it. Add to that, all those awesome features talked about in various discussions and forums are available even in the free edition of Mailchimp.

MailChimp free edition comes with 12,000 free emails per month and a maximum of 2000 subscribers. For any new blogger or startup, these numbers are really good. Since we had an email list that surpassed the 2000 limit, we went for the paid account which comes for $99 for 10,000 subscribers per month for unlimited mail campaign.

Over a period of 3 months, our email list jumped upto 25,000. You can calculate the amount we were paying to the Chimps to handle email campaigns. With one of the most convenient and easy to use Mailchimp email editor, we were also taking full advantage of A/B testing and managing multiple email lists to segment users.

MailChimp Email Marketing Solution

No doubt the email templates supplied were great to us for certain email campaigns but we found that for an e-commerce marketer, MailChimp did not have enough of email templates which we could make use of like other MailChimp alternatives. Not to forget the feature of MailChimp was Mobile Responsive email template, which is little tricky to make these days. Finally, while calculating ROI of the email campaigns with MailChimp we severely failed to meet expectations and finally stopped using it. So, now we had the right time, to look out for cheaper Mailchimp alternative.

1. MailChimp Alternative – SendinBlue

SendinBlue ( read a detailed review of SendinBlue ) is another alternative for Mailchimp, which places itself as all-in-one email solution for small business which provides email and SMS for email marketing campaigns including transaction and marketing automation. The best feature about SendinBlue is that they charge you based on the number of sent emails and SMS. Apart from English SendinBlue application is also available in other languages including Français, Español, Português, Italiano, Deutsch. With the ability to add unlimited contacts you can send 9,000 emails per month free and 40,000 emails for $25 per month.

2. MailChimp Alternative – EasySendy Drip

MailChimp vs EasySendy Drip – $14 plan for 5000 Contacts

EasySendy Drip’s plan of $14 allows sending 50,000 emails to 5,000 contacts per month. Though we thought this plan to be costly, we still went ahead and gave it a try. With EasySendy Drip, Email Newsletters and email drip campaigns are made super easy.

The unique feature of EasySendy Drip is that it allows integrating through email delivery API of Amazon SES, SendGrid and MailGun. This feature helped us to control our email delivery budget in check. For example, if we were sending 50,000 emails in a month, then we had to pay only $5 to Amazon SES and, in certain months, if the email delivery goes over 100,000 then we had to pay $10 to Amazon SES.

3. MailChimp Alternative – Mailerlite

MailChimp vs Mailerlite – The 12x Cheaper Mailchimp Alternative

MailChimp Alternative-MailerLite

After we were failing to meet expectations with Mailchimp and keeping a check with our email marketing budget until now we had tried many options for Mailchimp alternatives. Not willing to give up easily, we also tried using a MailChimp Alternative namely MailerLite. In the first impression when we looked at the price, we were quite surprised. As we took a look at the Demo of the email editor, I assumed that it is cheap because it might have low email delivery rate.

MailChimp Alternative-MailerLite-Price Comparision

As I explored its features in details, I got to know the real reason behind the low price- Their team said, they have kept the price low because they mostly dealt with bulk email marketing for enterprises and they have not made the product clamped up with features which very few marketers use. This helped them to keep Mailerlite affordable at a cheap price.

After this, I checked the testimonials, where they mention More than 40,000 happy Customers. They included some of the best online marketers and they were all real testimonials!

Convinced with the insight, I went ahead and signed up for a Mailchimp alternative Mailerlite Trial Account, which gave me access to send email to 1000 email subscribers. After a few hours I checked the report and the result was jaw-dropping- 55% Open Rate! Usually this list of 1000 email on Mailchimp also had an opening rate of around 60%. So, looking at the number I was completely satisfied and went ahead taking a pro account for 30,000 Subscribers. For this 30,000 subscribers I had to pay $297 Only for an Year for Unlimited Emails!

Price Check: The price is exact 12 times cheaper than what we were spending on Mailchimp Pro account for a month!

Now we are quite satisfied with the features and the services provided by MailChimp Alternative – Mailerlite. The one best feature which can compete with Mailchimp, is their ‘drag and drop Newsletter Editor’, which is quite simple to use, beautiful and very lightweight. Overall you get wonderful control over creating your beautiful newsletters. Along with this, Mailerlite also gives default email templates to play with.

MailChimp Alternative-MailerLite Editor

Some other features worth exploring also included drip email Autoresponders combined with Webform, which we regularly use to send email newsletters, step-by-step for every new subscribers.

In Mailchimp we were also using Segment Feature under the list of email subscribers, which gave us the flexibility to filter those who were not opening our emails. Yes, the same feature is also present in Mailerlite, which you can use quite frequently for effective email list management.

At any point when you are done with the campaigns you can also use Email Campaign Report to Track everything including opens, clicks, unsubscribes, spam complaints, bounces, link activity, reading environment and much more.

MailChimp Alternative-MailerLite Email Reports

Update 1: Recently, we started using RSS campaign feature of Mailerlite which enables us to send automated RSS feed campaigns for our blog posts to our subscribers automatically. No doubt this feature again is very simple to use and have very setup to complete and get started. This is alternative feature form MailChimp which takes big leap in favour of Mailerlite.

MailChimp Alternative-MailerLite RSS Campaign

Hope, this post will help you get the right software to send Email Campaigns at Affordable price. You can check and try out Mailerlite – The Mailchimp Cheaper Alternative from here.

Once you start using Mailerlite, let me know your experience in the comment section below.

Update 2: Mailchimp alternative,MailerLite, has added the ability to create landing pages through a drag and drop editor. Through this, you can easily create E-Course, Invite, Webinar, Coming soon, Lead Generation, Product, E-book landing pages without any coding skill!

Mailchimp Alternative-MailerLite

Other than these latest updates, MailerLite also added some of the amazing features like Auto Resend, Click Maps in campaign reports and RSS email campaigns for publishers and bloggers.

Update 3: MailerLite has announced new prices for the subscriber limits. It can be found here. This pricing will be applicable for new customers and will be visible on the website from 01-September-2016. So, the existing paid customer can still access old pricing structure; also, if you plan to upgrade your MailerLite plan to paid one now, then, you will continue to get the existing (reduced) pricing for a lifetime.

After 25-May-2018; MailLite has added GDPR related features which include, right to be forgotten, proof of Subscriber consent, identifying EU users, data processing agreement and so on. You can register with MailerLite from here and discuss with their team on GDPR feature and process enablement.

4. MailChimp Alternative – AWeber

MailChimp vs Aweber – Trial Start at $1 Only Aweber says ‘Start $1 Trial‘. In this plan, you get a 30 days trial for $1 only. Once we finished the 30 days trial period, we took the paid plan which was starting at $19 per month for 500 contacts only. Although this plan gave us the independence of sending as many campaigns as we wanted, our increasing list made Aweber an expensive option again.

Mailchimp Alternative-AWeber

I would mention here that we used Aweber only because they are well known for their auto-responder features, and they also accept internet marketers and affiliate marketers.

5. MailChimp Alternative – Campayn

MailChimp vs Campayn – 20,000 Free Email for 2000 Contacts Trying out various options did not deter our spirits, and we kept on trying new solutions. The next in our league was Campayn- A new email marketing company which promises to send upto 20,000 emails to 2000 contacts per month under the Free Plan. Paid plans starts at $10 per month only!

Overall, it can be very wells aid that Campayn is designed mainly for micro merchants and small businesses- Courtesy, the ease of use. We used Campayn but still it was not what we were looking for. Also, Campayn was just few cents cheaper than Mailchimp.

74 Comments

Last year I was using Campaignmonitor and now I am regular customer of Getresponse. I am very much satisfied with it. I can’t see much of the options in Mailerlite but for my other e-commerce business, the volume email pricing looks cost saving for us over Getresponse. I would like to give Mailerlite a test drive, and hope it turn to be great alternative email marketing software for our company. Thanks for information.

Great review. Will definitely consider it. One problem I have with Mailchimp is that, not only is the same subscriber counted twice if it figures on two separate lists, there is no tool that enable extracting the subscribers figuring on more than one list. The only way is to check each subscriber one by one – not practical with thousands of subscribers.

Also, do you know if mailer lite is compatible with Mandrill – I have auto responder enabled on Magento with Mandrill…

You can manually compare the email lists with in csv excel file and remove the duplicates. MailerLite should be compatible with Mandrill. But can you please explain me little more, so, that I can analyse the scenario, what kind of integration are you planning to have?

Ankit, Great post! We at SendinBlue have many users who switched to our email marketing service because we also offer very competitive prices and still provide friendly and responsive customer support.

Users can send up to 9k emails per month for free, and our paid plan pricing is based on the number of emails sent rather than the number of contacts in the database.

If you’re interested in how we stack up, feel free to compare our features and pricing with MailChimp and several others:

Great article! However, some facts are a bit different now. My update: – Mailchimp free edition comes with unlimited emails per month and a maximum of 1000 subscribers. – Price comparison is also now a bit different, you can check here: https://www.mailerlite.com/mailchimp-alternative

Oh, you are right – Mailchimp free edition comes with 12,000 free emails per month and a maximum of 2000 subscribers. I’ve thought of Mailerlite free edition which comes with unlimited emails per month and a maximum of 1000 subscribers. 😉 Cheers!

Would you mind to consider including http://FreshMail.com in the next update of the article? It’s also European-based ESP cheaper than MailChimp. A free account lets you send up to 2000 messages to 500 recipients each month. Autoresponders, inbox and spam tests are included in a free plan.

Hi Ankit, this is a great post. I was also introduced before with MailerLite but did not go into exploring since I’m yet to setup my list building process after the fanpage has gathered audience. I’ll look into this service. Thanks.

In the wake of perusing this article on Mailchimp Alternatives, I agreed to SendinBlue it appeared to be so basic and simple sadly it won’t give me a chance to send a test email and after a few endeavors to get bolster I should consider other mail programs. A debt of gratitude is in order for a truly average elegantly composed article.

Hi Dean. After doing some research I found Soundtest. I haven’t tested it out properly yet, but it seems to offer really good value for money. Another promising aspect of it that customer-provided ratings I found online are also great, especially regarding customization tools and user-friendliness. I figured it could be a good alternative for you as well, here’s the link in case you’d like to check it out; https://www.soundest.com/mailchimp-alternative

After reading this article on sat I signed up for Sendinblue it seemed so simple and easy unfortunately it won’t let me send a test email and after several attempts to get support I will need to consider other mail programs like you mentioned, Mailer lite. Thanks for a really decent well written article.

Hi Ankit. Great Post. While I was doing a more rigorous search, I came across https://retainly.co which is just amazing, to be put in 1 word. It is the most advanced marketing automation platform and apparently the most affordable so far. :-). You could add it to your list. Your readers will thank you for it I am sure.

Hi Ankit! Could you throw some light on what are the kinds of restrictions Google Feedburner Email Subscriber Update feature comes along with. After all it is a free service, when you think one should start worrying about moving on from it.

Hi Ankit, I’m really curious to know…so after you bought the Mailerlite pro account, what was the click open rate of emails? Was it as good as Mailchimp? And you’re saying $297 is basically 12x cheaper than MailChimp, right?

MailChimp provides complete solutions for email marketing. The user-friendly nature and easy access make MailChimp a favorite among all. Some of the cheaper alternatives to MailChimp are AWeber, Mailerlite, Campaign Monitor, SendinBlue, and Campyn. Though MailChimp has its own mark, the other email marketing tools can also provide different inbuilt and customized features that might not be available with the others. Some of their price models are also promising.

Thank you for this article, Ankit. My company recently switched from MailChimp to MailerLite and while the importing of contacts was simple, I’ve yet to get a response from Customer Service for an issue we’re having with approved campaign mailing size. Nowhere on site is there a LiveChat or a phone number (even though in some of their marketing materials it specifically states that MailerLite offers Live Chat support), and I’ve submitted three emails over the past three weeks without so much as a response from the MailerLite support team. So beware, anyone who’s thinking of making the switch. The level of support you will receive from MailerLite is nonexistent.

Thank you for this very informative article. This list looks very promising. I was sure that I wanted mailchimp but now there are other good options like mailerlite which looks like a great alternative.

Looking for an option similar to Mailchimp where I can automate a weekly calendar email using an html page as my content (literally just provide the url of the webpage where our calendar resides). Mail chimp does not let me auto send the same setup every week, I have to set up the content/template for each week and schedule it for that particular Sunday. I would prefer to setup 1 template and just tell it to email out every Sunday. Where can I do this?

The best one for small businesses is GetResponse that is great value for money. It has a number of features like creating landing pages, drag and drop editor, tracking, and scheduling of the webinars and others.

Ankit, Automizy is a great alternative to MailChimp where you have to pay only for the active contacts. There is no e-mail repetition and therefore you pay just once. Another option is easysendy Pro with the help of which you can send bulk e-mails in a jiffy.

I am not a coder but with the mailchimp drag and drop functionality I am able to create some great looking e-mail designs. It is super easy to use , cost-effective(for small teams) and great option for startups.

I signed up for Sendinblue for it is quite hard to find an email marketing service that provides automation for free. I do not own a big business, so their free plan works for me. The one thing that I found a bit glitchy is their email designer interface as Mailchimp has a much easier interface to work with. Maybe it is just me who finds it a bit disappointing otherwise Sendinblue is perfect.

Hi Ankit! Im thinking of trying mailerlite as i am just starting a blog. I have mail chimp currently. Do you know if mailerlite allows subscriber pop-up forms to be shown on mobiles in a form other than banner form? On mail chimp they default to banner form on mobiles which i don’t care for.